I'm just gonna post this, then back off and listen (been yapping too
much...)
The previous discussions about string concat and how to replace . have
revealed that people are somewhat divided over whether replacing -> with
. is actually good thing or not.
I'm just curious what the arguments for and against it are. PLEASE don't
turn this into an unproductive religious flamewar. I'm open-minded about
it, but I at least need a little convincing. Whether or not this has any
impact on Larry's decision is unknown, but it seems like it's good to at
least have the pros and cons clearly on the table.
Just to start it off, here are some of the arguments against changing
this that I know of. If you know of others, or are on the "for" side of
things, feel free speak up. Politely, PLEASE.
Arguments Against Changing -> and .
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- It gains superficial similarity to other HLL's,
yet Perl is fundamentally semantically different
from all of them. Plus, this is not the only
syntactic difference.
- JAPH compatibility. Thousands of people already
know how deref and concat work, and they're the
target audience for Perl 6, after all. Sure, we'd
closer to Python, but we'd be further from Perl 5.
- C compatibility. One of Perl's great strengths
over other HLL's is C compatibility. Though
this is still arguably not as good as it can be,
why distance ourselves from the language we're
trying to interact with?
- Dissimilarity between Perl and languages like
JavaScript can actually be beneficial. If you're
generating code, this makes it easier to scan
and see where your Perl ends and your Java begins.
- Two keys less to press? Ever heard of macros? :-)
